Mabrouk 3aleina ya SC basha. 20 helos in one month, that's crazy. That'll practically complete the entire order since they've already delivered 19, and now 20 more out of a total of 46. 7 more to go after that. Now we should see a lot more pics of them.
Hahaaa, what took you so long? lol. You know I went easy on you and left out the pic of the recon scouts with the manpack radios!
I had another wise-*** comment for that one too looool!
No Bowmans!
You told me previously in this thread that instead of the orange swaths, this was a requirement. I didn't believe it then but now you're saying something different. Maybe I misunderstood your original comment, highly unlikely, though.
On the spine? Where did you see that? Most of the ones I've seen are almost identical to the Egyptian ones except placed a bit lower on the vertical stabilizer base.
Even their newer block 52s.
Unless this is what you mean by "spine." If so, that's only on the 52Ds. BTW, how sweet for the Pakistanis that they're using JDAMs now? Good for them.
A sacrilegious abomination! lol
I bet you $5 they well stay on there forever!
Standardized Smanderdized. I'm with
@Harpcore_lover , it's too emblematic (pun intended) of British colonization. If the standardization is because there's a common rule for all air forces to follow certain guidelines and codes for insignia identification, it can stay within the basic premise just make it so it's different and original.
I don't need it. lol. But I know what you mean. THEY need to get rid of it once and for all. It's so tacky beyond belief. I'll tell you what, though, those Saudi Typhoons are so sweet it's not even funny, sorry Tay.
The best part about that 2-seater that is frankly lacking in the Rafale is the continuous glass canopy without a separation rail. A much less obstructed view for the back-seater.
Welcome! I knew exactly what your question was referring to in your post when I first read it, haha. It's cool, nothing wrong with discussing a potential, military campaign that might be heading in that direction with the latest developments. Every time we've reached out to the Ethiopians, they've been somewhat receptive until they started having issues with their prime minister and the riots in the streets and wanted to postpone talks. Unfortunately that reeked of stalling, especially when the talks dealt with the critical phase of the filling up timeline of the dam. At the same time, the dam is continuing to be built which is ok. We don't want them not to have something that will improve the quality of their lives and the development of their country, but sidelining Egypt is not in good faith.
To add to what's been said already, the aircraft of choice in a hypothetical scenario like this would be of course, the Rafales. And that's why we ordered the SCALP cruise missiles with them, in order to have that standoff range and capabilities. While the EAF F-16's PGMs are all laser guided, so are the HAMMERs on the Rafales, but the SCALPs are GPS guided weapons which Egypt does not own currently. That means that if an attack would take place before the SCALPs are delivered, they would need to approach the dam to illuminate and designate targets. While the export SCALPs have a 300km range, that's still pretty significant and would greatly help reduce range for the Rafales and any possible F-16s escorting. Although ideally, you would want it the other way around being that the Rafales are better equipped with the MICAs to be the escort role rather than the attacking one and leave that to the F-16s. But the F-16s have nothing similar to the SCALP (only GBUs) so they'll need to be air escorts with AIM-7s and AIM-9s to protect the Rafales.
The Rafales are the absolute perfect fighters for a mission like this. With their data fusion cockpits and especially SPECTRA, they can jam, thwart, confuse and fool most of anything the Ethiopians might throw at them. They just need the SCALP cruise missiles to make it a lot easier.
Another consideration is the new MiG-35s. Those are pretty potent and have longer range A2A BVR missiles in the R-77s so they can escort without any issues at all for that mode. And for attack, they're equipped with KH-38 air to surface missiles with 40 km range. Gotta get closer than the Rafales but still, don't need to ping over the target.
Both the Rafales and the MiG-35s will be equipped with buddy-buddy refueling since we've seen pics of both that would indicate that capability will be available in the EAF. We don't have any tankers and cannot use Saudi ones since they're not allowed to use them over any airspace other than their own, if I'm not mistaken.
This is an Egyptian MiG-35 with pretty much the buddy/buddy setup in Russia.
And here's an EAF Rafale recently training in France with L'Armee de l'air on buddy/buddy refueling which will most certainly be coming to Egypt with the 36 platforms.
The first choice would be to fly from Egypt so as to not only rely on another country, but to implicate it in the act is not desirable. But worst comes to worst and that needs to be done, the EAF has several options; the first one being the UAE airbase in Eritrea. Since they're good friends of ours and we cooperate on many levels, it wouldn't be an issue. We are also very close with Eritrea so it shouldn't be a problem in that respect either. That would cut down exponentially on the kilometers. But there is an intelligence risk of exposing a surprise attack when 24 Egyptian fighter jets showing up at a UAE airbase in Eritrea. All intelligence satellites will be ringing alarms and lighting up like Christmas trees lool. So taking off from Aswan air base in Egypt would be the best option. I wrote a whole hypothetical technical analysis of what I thought would be the procedure to pull off such a stunt in another thread.